Stutter

• Manning Peart, Grade 10, Whitefriars College
• Poetry
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'The Text Generation 2014' competition

My friend Alex speaks with a stutter.
Every syllable or so he utters flutters,
Alex was bullied in school, and he felt in the gutter,
Shy and insecure he talks quietly; he mutters,

Head bowed down, he avoids others,
Else be ridiculed for his unique blunders,
He kept to his studies, and found himself a medium,
Music could express his thought much better than the median.

His expression was disjointed and unpredictable,
The structure sometimes got lost,
But he practised the piano until his flows were biblical,
And the joy that brought him had no cost,

We all make mistakes, and involuntary ones aren’t too bad,
And when I think about those stammers, interjections and prefixes,
I’ll say this with no stutter, flutter and I won’t mutter when I utter,
I’ll never be ashamed to stammer, bumble, falter or stutter.